Anschutz Is Making a Serious Investment

One thing is clear about this season-ending women’s tennis tournament at Staples Center that we are asked to be attentive to, and breathless about. The guy footing the bill is serious about this and willing to reach way down into his incredibly deep pockets.

Yes, tennis fans. For some reason that only he and his closest compadres are privy to, billionaire Phil Anschutz is writing lots of big checks with your sport on the payee line. Give him credit. Even speculate that he is a visionary. But you may also wrinkle your brow a bit.

To the non-engaged observer, tennis is a sport with four incredibly lucrative and appealing events called the Grand Slams, plus something occasionally compelling called the Davis Cup. The women’s version of that is called the Fed Cup, about which dozens care.

After that, you have weekly events all over the world. Frequently, in those, Europe competes with the United States, and Asia and South America compete with both. The men’s tour competes for attention that the women’s tour wants, and both scramble for dollars and exposure from the handful of cable TV networks that might very well put them on the air at midnight.

So what’s a nice guy like Anschutz doing in a place like tennis, where some of the top players make so much money that some of them may be threatening his Forbes 400 ranking one of these years? If he gave interviews, we might get answers to that. But if actions speak louder than words, this guy is serious.

This is the third year that the Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG) has run this event, which gathers the top eight female players in the world in one place and rewards them by rolling out a $3-million purse. If you are the event operator, that $3 million is just part of the nut you have to crack. This year, according to Shaun Hunter, chief marketing officer for AEG, the promotional expenditure for the event will be $500,000. That puts you at $3.5 million out of pocket, and nobody has even factored in how much it costs to turn the lights on in the building for six days, even though the building is owned by, of course, Anschutz.

The attendance is better this year, about 1,500 a session above last year, and well above the first year here, 2002, when the AEG people were dispatching interns to bring in the homeless and paper the house for afternoon sessions. Sadly, most of the homeless declined.

This year, AEG created billboards of 17-year-old player/sex symbol Maria Sharapova in a provocative pose, creating both a buzz and column material for righteously indignant sports columnists. They also had Lindsay Davenport bobblehead doll night Friday and gave away tennis rackets to all ticket-buying attendees Saturday. They promoted hard, advertised lots and gave families who like tennis and might be frightened away by the perception of Staples Center prices a nice package of four hot dogs, four sodas, four tickets and parking for $59.

The problem is that you can promote the devil out of this, but when you wake up in the morning, it is still tennis, a sport that all too frequently turns its ankle when it steps off the curb.

Saturday’s crowd of 8,231, looking decent in Staples once they curtained off the entire top section, was treated to Davenport beating Serena Williams in three sets. These are two of the greatest female players ever, and this should have been memorable. But it meant only that Williams would advance to today’s semifinals and Davenport probably wouldn’t. This will be explained in other stories in today’s paper, since there is limited space for something that calls for expansive dissertations by a team of Caltech mathematicians.

But Anschutz, God bless him, pushes on. The event will return next year. And who among us would question a man worth billions who once bought a railroad with the full knowledge that the adjacent land would be more valuable than the trains and tracks and the commerce they created?

We have to assume he knows what he is doing. But a few prayers before bed at night wouldn’t hurt. After all, billionaires are people too.